promethea

I'd list your major GPA alongside your overall GPA on your CV, etc., and not worry about it beyond that. I was in a similar situation (a bio minor lowered my overall GPA because of chem classes that I had to take), but I ended up at a pretty well-respected PhD program anyway. If you need more time to devote to grad apps though, I'd recommend dropping your bio research instead of dropping the major entirely. I wish that I had made my bio minor into a major-- graduating with a B.S. in addition to my classics B.A. would have made me feel a lot better about career backups if classics doesn't work out for me!

In addition to the prior comments, GPA is far from the most important thing that admissions committees look at. As long as it's relatively high, it doesn't seem like it's given a second glance; the most important things are the research experience and the languages. However, I would also advise to just graduate on time (unless you're looking to graduate early to save money, which is totally understandable and important!) You still have to take the GRE, and more experience is always better. More time to work on writing those applications helps too-- mine took me about a year and a half.

Does anyone have advice for campus visits? In particular, I'm biting my nails at the prospect of sitting in on the language classes! I'm excited to see what they're like, but also terrified I'll be asked to translate some incredibly complex Greek or Latin passage and have an epic fumble...

Thanks for the info! I haven't heard anything from them, so I guess it's a no. That's okay though, it was a bit of a stretch anyway in terms of fit. Congratulations to those whoh did get acceptances!

Has anyone gotten news from Stanford? I have friends who've applied there in STEM fields too and none of us have heard anything yet!

Welcome! Those are all fantastic programs; fingers crossed that the next news you get is undeniably good news!

My goodness, that's such quick turnaround! Best of luck!

Awesome, thanks for the intel, y'all! Guess I'll have to just find a way to make myself chill out and wait now. Maybe I'll start Myths & Monsters like someone else here suggested earlier...

Most of the programs that I applied to have a really long range of time in terms of when they make application decisions-- January through March or April! But I've also heard, unofficially, that most decisions get made by January or February. Has anyone heard back from programs yet, or does anyone know when programs will actually start sending out acceptances?

I don't have any experience with the program, but am also backup planning and had mostly just had Penn on my radar... I guess UGA's is much more affordable?

Χαίρετε! I'm still in the thick of my applications-- some to PhD and some to MA programs, all in the US. I've only applied to one Ivy, but the rest of the PhD programs I've applied to are at that level as well. Feeling pretty similar to @Sapphosgirl , @Passer and others here in terms of not being very optimistic-- I've also had a pretty nontraditional undergraduate experience at least where Classics is concerned, but I've jumped around to lots of different institutions for summer classes, study abroad terms, auditing, etc. to make up for this, and I have a ton of research and presentation experience. I like my statement of purpose I've created so far, but my writing sample is from my thesis, in which I don't think I did as great a job as I could have done in structuring my argument and incorporating my citations effectively. We'll see what happens!